DOWN THE LINE

From "¥150,000" by Cunningham Thomson

An extract from a long short story about a martial arts practitioner’s loss of control in a Tokyo language school.

I started to feel quite odd, sweating up markedly around my heaving middle. The left side of my face started to twitch. Maybe it was Gordon's smug smile suggesting to me he hadn’t done anything wrong, that it was all my misjudgement. This awful possibility and my total disrespect for him combined to cause me to lose my legendary composure. Something snapped. I recall swaying from side to side. Weird moaning sounds seemed to emanate from me. Arms raised, breathing in slowly, arms out and down, breathing out sharply, legs solidly placed ….. "Ayeee!" I had been practising Seido karate for 30 years and I had a second-degree black belt, strong on the development of self-control ... !

A chair and its tiny desktop rattled across the room, causing seat and attachment to be rent asunder. Another well-placed kick embedded the curved prongs of the coat-stand into the wall. Sweeping sideways like a matador turning, my right leg swishing, I hit the bas-relief map of Japan way up in the north, the tip of the island of Hokkaido, just below the disputed islands of Sakhalin - a good high kick. In the middle of this virtuoso performance, Gordon said quietly and placatingly, “I can see that you’re upset. Something tells me that there can be no more fruitful discussion right now.”  Did I detect a smirk?

“Yeh, damn right!” I agreed, and later recalled ruefully that my voice resembled some twittering bird, rather shrill. I even started to move like a pigeon, my head poking forwards and backwards uncontrollably, but my peripheral vision took in the whiteboard. I let fly at it with a powerful jab of my right foot - it juddered on its moorings and buckled forward. I kicked again jack-hammering at both board and wall, made of flimsy soft-board. It occurred to me that to be careful because I could easily trap my foot in the shards of wall. I did not want to look silly at this moment of truth. The bonsai on the windowsill was a safer target than the wall; fifty years of miniature growth in a porcelain pot was laid to waste as I swept it aside with a mighty mawashi geri, a roundhouse kick, long-practised and admired by many, executed perfectly here with the instep delivering the killer blow. Both bonsai and its pot flew into the grill of the central heater just over Gordon’s head. Suddenly, he was off fleeing out the door, muttering about his class waiting for him and needing all his body parts in perfect working order to be able to teach - more likely just to prepare the video machine to show some episode of “The Simpsons” for the hundredth time.

I stood stock still for a few minutes but for clenching and unclenching my fists as I regained my composure, repeating over and over my martial mantra: "Bushi, Do! Bushi, Do! Do! Do!" (Er, that's "Do" as in "sparrow" or "flamingo" not as in "kangaroo"). I took out a gold-monogrammed handkerchief, mopped my brow and dabbed the thick damp folds of my muscular bull-like neck. Strangely, a wondrous calm descended upon me …..